[efarmer]

http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/file ... /rr172.pdf

is one largish document that attempts to bring most of the major factors
into account.

[Loki]

My sense is that we'll continue to see divergent trends in American agriculture in the years and decades to come. On the one hand an exacerbation of hyperindustrial globalized chemical agriculture for calorie production, on the other an expansion of small, locally oriented organic farming (for those who can afford it or choose to prioritize good food over xBoxes and Hawaiian vacations).

Both are probably needed at this point, but I've personally put my eggs in the latter basket. I don't think we'll see a Sharon Astyk style "nation of farmers" in my lifetime, but we'll probably creep in that direction. By the end of the century, who knows, maybe we'll have a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer republic. Or, more likely, a return to feudalism.

Re. tractors, you'll have to pry them out of the cold dead hands of even the smallest farmers. The only people wanting to go back to farming by hand are those who have never spent all day on their hands and knees weeding carrots. Not as romantic as it sounds.

Tractors last for decades, we use one from the 1950s for cultivation and potato hilling, temperamental beast but sure as shit beats weeding and hilling potatoes by hand. Some folks have electrified them, google Farmall electric tractor.

Walk-behind tractors are vastly superior to a hoe or horse-drawn plow---these could probably be electrified with a bit more ease than your average 200 hp combine. Recharge the batteries with solar. Only problem is the farmer would have to pray for both rain and sun simultaneously

[Shaved Monkey]

If digging is going to be the hardship I suggest no dig.
Here is a garden in France based on Permaculture principles green manure and no dig.
The worms do all the digging its your job to keep them happy and well fed with green manures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy_x5rXq19g
She based her techniques on Masanobu Fukuoka The One Straw Revolution
the art of non-cultivation and do-nothing, natural farming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSKSxLHMv9k

[Quinny]

Thanks Shaved - just given me some inspiration - or a kick up the arse

[KaiserJeep]

If permaculture is to persist, then the labor of one farmer must feed 30 people. Which sounds like a lot, but represents only about 1% of the 3000 or so people fed by a modern mechanized farmer.

Do the numbers. We have to feed 350 million people without cheap oil for tilling, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.

Even then, the numbers of people and the arable land devoted to permaculture must be scaled upwards 100X from where we are today. Else it is not a viable solution.

[Shaved Monkey]

If permaculture is to persist, then the labor of one farmer must feed 30 people. Which sounds like a lot, but represents only about 1% of the 3000 or so people fed by a modern mechanized farmer.

Do the numbers. We have to feed 350 million people without cheap oil for tilling, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.

Even then, the numbers of people and the arable land devoted to permaculture must be scaled upwards 100X from where we are today. Else it is not a viable solution.

Here is a 4Mx2M (about the same in yards) balcony in NZ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq5TnrIm ... e=youtu.be

[KaiserJeep]

Obviously, we are still going to use some form of mechanized agriculture, whatever we can manage using alternative energy sources.

Permaculture is a "do it yourself" method, unless you can point at some permaculture technique that achieves the necessary productivity where one farmer feeds 300 people. That should be an achievable goal with alternative energy, being only 1/10th of the productivity with fossil fuels.

[Loki]

If digging is going to be the hardship I suggest no dig.
Here is a garden in France based on Permaculture principles green manure and no dig.
The worms do all the digging its your job to keep them happy and well fed with green manures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy_x5rXq19g
She based her techniques on Masanobu Fukuoka The One Straw Revolution
the art of non-cultivation and do-nothing, natural farming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSKSxLHMv9k

I've downloaded your first vid and will watch it. But your key word is "garden." This will work on 35 acres of commercial cropland? And with how many workers? I'd like to see the balance sheet on this operation.

Re. permaculture, most of its advocates seem to be talking about hobby/subsistence gardening vs. production agriculture. Entirely different beasts, solutions for one don't necessarily translate into solutions for the other.

I personally love tractors. Spent the better part of today driving an old International tractor, spreading lime and pelletized fertilizer. We do this by hand sometimes, take a 5-gallon bucket with a hole in it, fill it with fertilizer or lime, and walk as fast as possible with it held out at arms length. Exhausting. Would probably take me a week of back-breaking labor to do what I did this afternoon with the tractor.

[Shaved Monkey]

Her garden seems pretty big for a garden


Here's an interesting one to watch progress
Milkwood setting up a market garden
They will document there stuff
They have pretty good youtube channel too.
http://permaculturenews.org/2011/06/09/ ... et-garden/


There website
http://www.milkwoodpermaculture.com.au/

[Quinny]

Loki - asking to see the balance sheet of a Permaculture holding kinda defeats the object in a way. They are bound to be more labour intensive than ff driven agriculture because of the higher labour content needed. Yield however is a different measure. Most permaculture projects produce attractive yields with less input and do so on an on-going basis.

[Shaved Monkey]

I can see where Loki is coming from he needs people with money to buy food from his boss so he pays him to farm.
Reducing running costs and dependence of FF is the way to go.
Less weeding, less digging,less fertiliser and insecticides makes it a lot more profitable and fun.
The greatest asset is the soil and what's in it.
Feeding it organic matter by planting green manures and nitrogen fixers and keeping the worms,bugs, bacteria and fungus active is the key.
Weeding removes organic matter and creates labour .ploughing and fertilising over activates bacteria that eats up your organic matter faster than your plants can use it.
Ploughing also destroys your fungi and soil structure.
The soil still grows plants but needs constant inputs to maintain a diminishing output.


I don't practice permaculture to make money.
Beside the environmental reasons and its fun, I practice it so I can massively reduce the amount of money and labour that I need to have a comfortable life.
I give away my excess(food, labour and skills) and people give away their excess to me, no money changes hand ,no ledgers are kept, everyone wins, except the shops and the banks and the middle men.

Even small scale backyard or balcony systems can save people heaps of money and improve their lives as food prices inevitably go up.
You need to enjoy it as a productive hobby or you need to have more time and less money as people will in the future.
And it works better the more there are.
Maybe that's how agriculture will work in the future.
People who can ,grow their expensive perishables, people who cant, buy them and let big Ag grow the grains and oils.

[Pops]

Maybe that's how agriculture will work in the future.
People who can ,grow their expensive perishables, people who cant, buy them and let big Ag grow the grains and oils.

I think that's probably right. There are root crops that get you lots of starch in a small area but most calories will come in from elsewhere for a long time yet. What works is what works, it needn't have a name or an 'ism' attached.

I think it's a mistake to get hung up on an "ism" since most are designed to make the guru money and permaculture® is no different. Permanent agriculture has been around since, well, since the original garden, lol. Plant some trees that do well in your area, plant some small fruits and brambles and perennials like asparagus, rhubarb, herbs & whatnot in your flower bed and you got permanent agriculture. You don't need a feng shui master, just ask the gal at the nursery what is good.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by jargon, just plant some stuff.

[Loki]

Loki - asking to see the balance sheet of a Permaculture holding kinda defeats the object in a way. They are bound to be more labour intensive than ff driven agriculture because of the higher labour content needed. Yield however is a different measure. Most permaculture projects produce attractive yields with less input and do so on an on-going basis.

If the alleged yield increase outweighs the increased labor input, balance sheet should be positive. But if there is no balance sheet, we're talking about gardening, not farming.

Gardening is fun and all that, and part of the answer to the food problem, but as I said, gardening and farming are two different beasts, and some of us still need to make a living in the real world. I have yet to see a permie acolyte address this. They seem to have all the answers, except for this question, apparently.

[Subjectivist]

Loki - asking to see the balance sheet of a Permaculture holding kinda defeats the object in a way. They are bound to be more labour intensive than ff driven agriculture because of the higher labour content needed. Yield however is a different measure. Most permaculture projects produce attractive yields with less input and do so on an on-going basis.

If the alleged yield increase outweighs the increased labor input, balance sheet should be positive. But if there is no balance sheet, we're talking about gardening, not farming.

Gardening is fun and all that, and part of the answer to the food problem, but as I said, gardening and farming are two different beasts, and some of us still need to make a living in the real world. I have yet to see a permie acolyte address this. They seem to have all the answers, except for this question, apparently.

I am curious where my childhood home would fit in your scale from garden to farm Loki. We had a garden of about half an acre, with an orchard and vinyard of another quarter of an acre, a poultry operation with 50 chickens and half a dozen each duck and geese. We also grazed a small herd of beef cattle on my uncles farm giving us three full beef cattle per year. My dad worked 40 hours a week at a factory, my mom worked 20 hours a week at a resturaunt as a cook and all of the kids labored on the home acre and on my uncles farm raising poultry, beef, fruit, grapes, potatoes and vegetables. The only food we bought were grain products like bread, and milk which we occasionally got from the neighboring dairy farm but mostly got from the store. There was a lot of canning done from mid summer into fall and two large freezers for fresh frozen strawberries and veggies but mostly for meat.

[PrestonSturges]

I just wanted to point out to the permies that mulberries will be in season soon and you propagate them by sticking berries in a cup of dirt, where they sprout in a couple weeks.

I have several mulberry trees that I propagated two and three years ago and one is getting berries so it's female. If you had a couple mulberry trees in the yard, horse apple trees, Meader persimmons, honey locust, elderberry, whatever kind of nut grows locally, and a nice patch of some edible legume, that would go a long way to supporting a flock of chickens or geese most of the year. Actually I think crabgrass is good animal feed also. Scale up and you can support a couple hogs. If you have enough land for shooting or archery you can plan to harvest lots of deer.

Agronomists were just starting to figure this out when mechanization and lack of migrant pickers was tipping the balance towards row crops and mechanical harvesters.

[Loki]

Walk-behind tractors are vastly superior to a hoe or horse-drawn plow---these could probably be electrified with a bit more ease than your average 200 hp combine. Recharge the batteries with solar. Only problem is the farmer would have to pray for both rain and sun simultaneously

I have a BCS 720. Three speeds forward (high speed only for hauling on a road), one reverse. Powered takeoff. I own a tiller, flail mower, and 1,000lb.-load cart.

BCSs are nice machines, lots of implements available, I used to use a one at my last farm job. I have a little 5 hp Troybilt that I got for a song from some permies who didn't know how to fix it. Fixed it up but haven't used it, no need to put in a garden for obvious reasons.

Chewed a bit more on my casual mention of running a walk-behind tractor on 12V batts. Back of the envelope calculation suggests it might be a bit tricky with current technology.

Assume an 8 hp walk behind (small when it comes to walking tractors, the BCS I used at my last job was 12 hp I believe).

8 hp = 5968 watts

5968 W @ 12V would draw 497 amps.

Assuming a deep cycle battery bank run down to 50%, I'd need a 1000 ah bank strapped to the tractor, four Trojan T-125s for example, which would weigh 264 lbs and are rather bulky.

And they'd only be good for an hour of use. Recharging would take a minimum of 2.5 hours at a 20% charge rate (rather high). And this doesn't include inefficiencies (wire loss, charging losses, etc.).

Even if I ran it off an electrical cord run from a stationary battery bank (highly inconvenient and dangerous), I'd still need a massive solar array to power it. My 158W panel produces 8.47 amps in ideal conditions. To charge a batt bank that size in 2.5 hours I'd need 24 panels, again not accounting for inefficiencies.

All to do the work of a 5 gallon can of gas.

While I think biofuels are ill advised when it comes to powering passenger vehicles, I think they're an excellent solution for powering tractors, particularly biodiesel. It makes no sense for individual farmers to produce their own, but it might make sense to produce biodiesel at a regional scale using crops best suited for that region, all of the resulting fuel being used exclusively for food production in that region.

Eventually there will be formal rationing of oil, more and more severe as the decades progress. Farmers will be among the last users. At some point farmers will switch to biofuels because that's all that will be available. By the end of the century tractors will almost certainly still be used to grow the vast majority of our food, but they'll be running on something other than fossil diesel.

[Loki]

Shaved, I watched your video on Emilia Hazelip. Great garden, no doubt. Ruth Stout style on steroids. She said it was a bit over an acre, about the size of our tomato field. Mostly standard straight beds with the exception of the spiral, which will make things far more difficult to manage than necessary, but it looks nice (if looks are what you're after).



Large initial labor input shaping the raised beds, that must have been back breaking to do by hand (easily done with a tractor, though; see my avatar). Looks to me like a significant amount of labor at every step of the process, from set up to maintenance, despite the linkage with Fukuoka's “do nothing” school. Such is the reality of growing food. The speed at which they were working is definitely home gardener, that level of labor productivity wouldn't fly on commercial farms. The low level of labor productivity is exacerbated by the mulch system.

Where I'm confused is why this is considered “permaculture.” She's planting annual crops for the most part, beans, potatoes, chard, tomatoes, etc., same stuff we grow. Her mulching system requires the importation of large quantities of mulch on a regular basis. Looks like straw for the most part. Straw production is done with tractors, multiple rounds of plowing, disking, harrowing, seeding, fertilizing/compost spreading, spraying, mowing, raking, baling, etc. And any idea how many hours spreading all this straw on an acre by hand would require? Many. The little kids in her video won't be doing it.

I'm also confused why this type of soil management is inherently superior to our use of manure, lime, cover crops, crop rotation, etc. Her explanations were rather mystical (“indigestion” from “force feeding soil” and such).

It mostly comes down to tillage, and I know, I know, tillage is the devil to permies. Yet soil actually improves with organic methods involving tillage, despite permie claims to the contrary. Weird.